Opinion: An industry goes up in smoke

In recent years, many changes came to the smoking world and it’s community when it comes to cigarettes. With vaping gaining attraction and sales in the younger and older demographic, it’s taken a chunk from big tobacco’s revenue and future estimations and set them into a panic.

Younger and older consumers alike are taking up vaping or e-cigarettes as an alternative to smoking tobacco through cigarettes or cigars, this leaves vaping as the main culprit to big tobacco’s losses.

As a result, cigarette companies pulled some strings with our state to keep up revenue and defeat some competition by encouraging the passing of laws and regulations to not just vape, but their own products.

This put hundreds of smaller companies out of business and left others to be bought out by big tobacco, where they can then jump through the necessary hoops to be able to distribute their product and continue to dominate the market. They did this by lobbying the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) from allowing other companies to grow by making these regulations and licenses expensive to obtain and get through.

Regulations were put on products of any tobacco replacement or those of that nature. Some of these products contain nicotine not derived from tobacco, and some contain no nicotine at all.

When these regulations were first published, even Forbes claimed them “incomprehensible”and left many in the community, consumers and business owners, confused. These regulations have had a positive and negative impact to the consumers a part of this community.

The regulation to raise the legal smoking age from eighteen to twenty-one, greatly 2 shrank the market, but helps keep older teens away from nicotine products, as vaping was most popular with the younger generation. The limitations put on vape juice and devices though, make vaping lose its foothold at being a more affordable and healthier than cigarettes.

The goal is to deter consumers from vape and to have them return to cigarettes.

States don’t oppose this idea either, as they still currently receive more taxes from cigarette companies than they do vape companies.

Multiple articles and campaigns argue that there are no recent studies that show that vaping is a healthier alternative to smoking cigarettes and it is best to avoid both.

Although it is healthier to avoid inhaling anything, there’s no denying the successful studies from outside the U.S. that claim different in that vaping is a healthier alternative or way to quit smoking cigarettes.

Some of these studies have discovered that vaping helps asthmatic smokers with their breathing to vaping not being as addictive, containing significantly less chemicals than the average cigarette.

It’s important to realize a trend in American society, that certain industries refuse to accept their loss and dying down and will do everything in their power to remain in their high-power position.

Its enough to put other small, successful companies out of business and change the age range of an entire market and industry in a blink of an eye. But there is no denying these changes come in vain when other countries are accepting this alternative wholeheartedly, even supporting it and causing more change as a result.